Ethereum transparent scalability with L2 zk-Rollup

• Ethereum-equivalence: all smart contracts, wallets, tools, etc work on zkEVM seamlessly.
• Ethereum security
• ZKP-powered scalability, orders of magnitude higher throughput than L1.

Polygon zkEVM is a Layer Two (L2) scaling solution for Ethereum that leverages the scaling power of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs while maintaining Ethereum-compatibility. Developers and users on Polygon zkEVM can use the same code, tooling, apps, etc that they use on Ethereum, but with much higher throughput and lower fees.

Developers will deploy their existing contracts to the zkEVM, and users can deposit assets from Ethereum and transact off-chain. These transactions are grouped into batches with a zero-knowledge proof proving the validity of each transaction. This ensures that the operators of the zkEVM can’t steal user funds, so we can say that it inherits the security of Ethereum L1. Polygon zkEVM offers compatibility and scalability without compromise.

Unique Value Propositions: EVM-equivalent and Performance

EVM-equivalent: Ethereum isn’t just a blockchain. It’s a rich ecosystem of smart contracts, developer tools, infrastructure, and wallets. It’s a vibrant community of developers, auditors, and users. The best way to scale Ethereum is to maintain compatibility with this ecosystem, and the zkEVM will give users and developers an identical experience to Ethereum L1 -- just with a massive scalability improvement.

Performance: Many people in crypto believed that a zkEVM was years away, and might never be practical or competitive with other ZK L2s. This was framed as an unavoidable tradeoff: we could have full EVM compatibility or high performance, but not both. However, with the proving system breakthroughs pioneered by Polygon Zero, we can achieve full EVM compatibility while offering better performance (higher throughput, lower latency, and lower cost) than alt-L1s, optimistic rollups, and other ZK rollups.

Defi Applications: Because of Polygon zkEVM’s high security and censorship resistance nature of it, it is a good fit for Defi applications. Unlike Optimistic Roll-ups where users have to wait for upto 7 days for deposits and withdrawals, zk-Rollups doesn’t have to wait for long periods for deposits and withdrawals i.e Polygon zkEVM offers better capital efficiency for dApps/users.

NFT, Gamefi and Enterprise applications: Low gas cost, high transactions and greater level of security coupled with Ethereum composability attracts blue chip NFTs, Gamefi and Enterprise applications.

Payments: Users interested in transacting with each other in real-time within a near-instantaneous and low fee environment will appreciate the value Polygon zkEVM provides.

Compatibility: The most well-known ZK scaling projects promise EVM compatibility but run a different VM architecture that requires developers to transpile or migrate code, breaking existing developer tooling and infrastructure. This is a disadvantage, because it means that they'll need to build a new ecosystem of developer tools and infrastructure from scratch.

The Ethereum developer ecosystem is the result of a huge investment of time and energy, and preserving compatibility with it is a major selling point for the zkEVM. We're not just scaling transactions per second on Ethereum, we're also building on the foundation of a vibrant community and ecosystem.

Performance: It's difficult to provide performance comparisons as benchmarks aren't public or don't exist yet. However, we anticipate that the Polygon zkEVM prover is the fastest one, being able to validate 500K gas units on a single CPU server (64 cores) in about 5 minutes time.
Polygon was the first to implement recursive STARKs, a core building block in ZK L2s, almost a year ahead of other teams. We've seen huge ~100x improvements in the most expensive operations in the zkEVM: keccak, ECDSA, and recursion, over the previous state of the art. Enabling recursion, zkEVM has a clear path to improve ZK proof times and scalability.

Security and Ethereum-alignment vs alt-L1s: Using ZK allows a ZK L2 to inherit the security of Ethereum. ZK proofs ensure that every transaction on the zkEVM is valid. This ensures that it's impossible for operators of the L2 to steal funds from users. Security (as well as scalability) is a major benefit for the zkEVM relative to alt-L1s, and it ensures that the zkEVM is closely aligned with Ethereum, still by far the dominant chain in terms of developer activity, TVL, NFT activity, etc.